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Morning Joe
January 10, 2014

74k jobs created in Dec.; unemployment at 6.7

Morning Joe
January 10, 2014

This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>>alex witt
. it's now been 44 days since the sequester took place. from cancer clinics turning away medicaid patients. joining us now is
nancy cook
, correspondent for the
national journal
. what sort of impact to
social security
cuts like
food banks
and the head start programs have on the economy overall?

>>they have an affect on the economy, it's a
fiscal drag
, it's a time when the
unemployment rate
still remains high, the housing industry is -- the economy is really struggling to get momentum and anything like spending cuts for instance really creates a fiscal cldrag that drags down the economy.

>>the administration is spending -- those numbers really don't add up there. but the cuts to the
social services
, they're obviously going to affect lower income people more. but then you have the furloughs for the government contractors. are all the classes being hit equally or not?

>>yeah, they certainly are. the thing is that the sequester exempts very
low income
people. it's not going to affect things like
health insurance
for children, veteran's programs, or
food stamps
, there are some protections built in. there are some affects for those in the
working class
, we're not going to see them until august, but it will come in the form of reduced unemployment checks and it also come in the place of civilian furloughs that will take effect this month.

>>only 88,000 new jobs in march. and though unemployment did faulfall technically speak.1%, that's just people leaving the workforce, so is this the beginning of a trend?

>>certainly, and it's not necessarily the sequester that's causing it at this point. kplis economists attribute it to the payroll tax endinging at the first of the year. and that's causing some slippage in things like retail jobs. but it certainly is a really worrisome trend that people are dropping out of the
labor force
all together and that the people participating in the
labor force
, we haven't seen that number this low since
1979
. which is pretty remarkable.